Timlin studied him closely.
‘Don’t you cry on me. If you do, I will too, so man up. There’s one more six-pack of Bud in the fridge. I don’t know why I bothered to put it in there, but old habits die hard. Why don’t you bring us each one? Warm beer is better than no beer; I believe Woodrow Wilson said that. We’ll toast Gandalf. Also your new motorcycle battery. Meanwhile, I need to spend a penny. Or, who knows, this one might cost a little more.’
Robinson got the beer. When he came back Timlin was gone, and remained gone for almost five minutes. He came back slowly, holding onto things. He had removed his pants and cinched a bath sheet around his midsection. He sat down with a little cry of pain, but took the can of beer Robinson held out to him. They toasted Gandalf and drank. The Bud was warm, all right, but not that bad. It was, after all, the King of Beers.
Timlin picked up the gun. ‘Mine will be the classic Victorian suicide,’ he said, sounding pleased at the prospect. ‘Gun to temple. Free hand over the eyes. Goodbye, cruel world.’
‘I’m off to join the circus,’ Robinson said without thinking.
Timlin laughed heartily, lips peeling back to reveal his few remaining teeth. ‘It would be nice, but I doubt it. Did I ever tell you that I was hit by a truck when I was a boy? The kind our British cousins call a milk float?’
Robinson shook his head.
‘Nineteen fifty-seven, this was. I was fifteen, walking down a country road in Michigan, headed for Highway Twenty-two, where I hoped to hook a ride into Traverse City and attend a double-feature movie show. I was daydreaming about a girl in my homeroom – such long, lovely legs and such high breasts – and wandered away from the relative safety of the shoulder. The milk float came over the top of a hill – the driver was going much too fast – and hit me square on. If it had been fully loaded, I surely would have been killed, but because it was empty it was much lighter, thus allowing me to live to the age of seventy-five, and experience what it’s like to shit one’s bowels into a toilet that will no longer flush.’
There seemed to be no adequate response to this.
‘There was a flash of sun on the float’s windshield as it came over the top of the hill, and then … nothing. I believe I will experience roughly the same thing when the bullet goes into my brain and lays waste to all I’ve ever thought or experienced.’ He raised a professorly finger. ‘Only this time, nothing will not give way to something. Just a flash, like sun on the the windshield of a milk float, followed by nothing. I find the idea simultaneously awesome and terribly depressing.’
‘Maybe you ought to hold off for awhile,’ Robinson said. ‘You might …’
Timlin waited politely, eyebrows raised.
‘Fuck, I don’t know,’ Robinson said. And then, surprising himself, he shouted, ‘What did they do? What did those motherfuckers do?’
‘You know perfectly well what they did,’ Timlin said. ‘And now we live with the consequences. I know you love that dog, Peter. It’s displaced love – what the psychiatrists call hysterical conversion – but we take what we can get, and if we’ve got half a brain, we’re grateful. So don’t hesitate. Stick him in the neck, and stick him hard. Grab his collar in case he flinches.’
Robinson put his beer down. He didn’t want it anymore. ‘He was in pretty bad shape when I left. Maybe he’s dead already.’
But Gandalf wasn’t.
He looked up when Robinson came into the bedroom and thumped his tail twice on his bloody pad of blankets. Robinson sat down next to him. He stroked Gandalf’s head and thought about the dooms of love, which were really so simple when you peered directly into them. Gandalf put his head on Robinson’s knee and looked up at him. Robinson took the hypo out of his shirt pocket and removed the protective cap from the needle.
‘You’re a good guy,’ he said, and took hold of Gandalf’s collar, as Timlin had instructed.
While he was nerving himself to go through with it, he heard a gunshot. The sound was faint at this distance, but with the lake so still, there was no mistaking it for anything else. It rolled across the hot summer air, diminished, tried to echo, failed. Gandalf cocked his ears, and an idea came to Robinson, as comforting as it was absurd. Maybe Timlin was wrong about the nothing. It was possible. In a world where you could look up and see an eternal hallway of stars, he reckoned anything was. Maybe –
Maybe.
Gandalf was still looking at him as he slid the needle home. For a moment the dog’s eyes remained bright and aware, and in the endless moment before the brightness left, Robinson would have taken it back if he could.
He sat there on the floor for a long time, hoping that last loon might sound off one more time, but it didn’t. After awhile, he went out to the lean-to, found a spade, and dug a hole in his wife’s flower garden. There was no need to go deep; no animal was going to come along and dig Gandalf up.
When he woke up the next morning, Robinson’s mouth tasted coppery. When he lifted his head, his cheek peeled away from the pillow. Both his nose and his gums had bled in the night.
It was another beautiful day, and although it was still summer, the first color had begun to steal into the trees. Robinson wheeled his Fat Bob out of the lean-to and replaced the dead battery, working slowly and carefully in the deep silence.
When he finished, he turned the switch. The green neutral light came on, but stuttered a little. He shut the switch off, tightened the connections, then tried again. This time the light stayed steady. He hit the ignition and that sound – summer thunder – shattered the quiet. It seemed sacrilegious, but – this was strange – in a good way.
Robinson wasn’t surprised to find himself thinking of his first and only trip to attend the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota, 1998 that had been, the year before he met Diana. He remembered rolling slowly down Junction Avenue on his Honda GB 500, one more sled in a parade of two thousand, the combined roar of all those bikes so loud it seemed a physical thing. Later that night there had been a bonfire, and an endless stream of Stones and AC/DC and Metallica roaring from Stonehenge stacks of Marshall amps. Tattooed girls danced topless in the firelight; bearded men drank beer from bizarre helmets; children decorated with decal tattoos of their own ran everywhere, waving sparklers. It had been terrifying and amazing and wonderful, everything that was right and wrong with the world in the same place and in perfect focus. Overhead, that hallway of stars.
Robinson gunned the Fat Boy, then let off the throttle. Gunned and let off. Gunned and let off. The rich smell of freshly burned gasoline filled the driveway. The world was a dying hulk but the silence had been banished, at least for the time being, and that was good. That was fine. Fuck you, silence, he thought. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. This is my horse, my iron horse, and how do you like it?
He squeezed the clutch and toed the gearshift down into first. He rolled up the driveway, banked right, and toed up this time, into second and then third. The road was dirt, and rutted in places, but the bike took the ruts easily, floating Robinson up and down on the seat. His nose was spouting again; the blood streamed up his cheeks and flew off behind him in fat droplets. He took the first curve and then the second, banking harder now, hitting fourth gear as he came onto a brief straight stretch. The Fat Bob was eager to go. It had been in that goddam lean-to too long, gathering dust. On Robinson’s right, he could see Lake Pocomtuc from the corner of his eye, still as a mirror, the sun beating a yellow-gold track across the blue. Robinson let out a yell and shook one fist at the sky – at the universe – before returning it to the handgrip. Ahead was the buttonhook, with the MIND YOUR DRIVING! sign that marked Dead Man’s Curve.